
A federal judge ruled against the Council on American-Islamic Relations today in its lawsuit against a father and son who carried out a six-month undercover investigation of the D.C.-based Muslim group, denying a request to conduct discovery - an examination of its opponent's witnesses, facts and documents - prior to hearing a motion to dismiss the case.CAIR is suing P. David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, for allegedly stealing sensitive internal documents and making recordings of officials without consent.
Chris Gaubatz, who posed as a Muslim in an internship with CAIR's national office in Washington, took some 12,000 pages of documents destined for a shredder in an attempt, he said, to expose the group's ties to Islamic jihad and terrorism. His father is a former Air Force special agent with extensive Middle East experience who researches the spread of radical Islam in the U.S. and its threat to national security.
In her ruling today, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., canceled a court hearing scheduled for Tuesday and gave CAIR until Jan. 15 to reply to the Gaubatz's motion to dismiss the case.
The motion filed last month by Gaubatz lawyer Daniel Horowitz asserts CAIR has no claim because it does not legally exist.
Horowitz explains that just two weeks after CAIR was named by the Justice Department in May 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist finance case in U.S. history, the organization changed its name to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network.
"CAIR is not a valid entity and even if it were, the exposure of its inner workings is part of the price it pays for being a controversial group in a hotly contested arena," Horowitz declares in his reply to CAIR's lawsuit.
The FBI produced evidence at the trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation in 2008 that CAIR was established as a front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The material obtained by the Gaubatzes is featured in the book "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," published by WND Books, an affiliate of WorldNetDaily.com.
The book asserts CAIR is acting as a front for a conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood - the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas - to infiltrate the U.S. and help pave the way for Saudi-style Islamic law to rule the nation.
Horowitz said CAIR had hoped to draw WND Books into the legal battle so it could pull the book off the shelves. But the federal judge's ruling today prevents the group from any legal investigation of the Gabautzes or WND Books under the court's authority before the motion to dismiss the case is heard....
With thanks to JihadWatch